Man, what an awesome article. It's not really that surprising that there's a wide variety in quality of treatment. I've seen plenty of incompetence coming from doctors in my life, which is part of the reason why it pisses me off that doctors think they're so great. Good, measure them against each other so they can get a reality check. However, I do find it worrying that being in the lower end of the spectrum could conceivably be grounds for a lawsuit, unless they are criminally bad. This sort of openness shouldn't be used to punish doctors, it should be used to teach them how to improve. The whole idea of "paying for quality" is also repulsive to me. Do you really think that doctors will improve because they see a bigger paycheck at the end of the line? Presumably, most doctors want to be good, they are ambitious career people after all. Not only that, but my guess would also be that the best doctors are good because they genuinely care about their patients, not how much more money they can squeeze out of the state. Yeah, I'm sure it'll really help the lower end doctors to apply more pressure and stress to them, in the form of increased legal risk, and pay cuts. Very motivating. Give me a break.
Yeah that part I don't like, but I don't have much of an alternative beyond some kind of massive overhaul of our medical education system as a whole, where under-performing physicians have to apprentice at high-performance centers to maintain their license.Yeah, I'm sure it'll really help the lower end doctors to apply more pressure and stress to them, in the form of increased legal risk, and pay cuts. Very motivating. Give me a break.
I think the way to go is to draw knowledge from the best performing clinics, and try to apply it at the others. Sending underperforming doctors to better clinics to learn seems like a reasonable approach.
I wish it were that easy. There's a surprising amount of dogma in modern medicine, and part of that dogma is a reasonable hesitance to use techniques that don't have rigorous evidence supporting their efficacy.Sending underperforming doctors to better clinics to learn seems like a reasonable approach.